How to Assess Platform Impact on Mental Health and Civic Norms

Nathaniel Lubin is an RSM fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and a fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Thomas Krendl Gilbert is a product lead at Mozilla, AI ethics lead at daios, and postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Shutterstock Last month, the US Surgeon General argued that technology platforms have fomented systemic harms, especially with respect to mental health, and do not merely reflect underlying societal challenges. He joined a range of academics, like Jonathan Haidt, and other critics that have raised the specter of a social media crisis. On the other hand, observers including the Washington Post Editorial Board declare that the “results aren’t in yet,” or that effects of social media are mixed between positive and negative, with some policymakers centering recommendations primarily on parents’ roles in limiting harmful usage (including Utah’s new law). These debates are difficult. For one, outside parties have very limited access to platforms. At the same time, platforms have disincentives to directly assess the effects of their product choices outside of maximizing growth. As a result, we have quite limited data connecting systemic outcomes to the product choices made by platforms. In a just-released proposal incubated at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the Cornell’s Digital Life Initiative, we seek to change that. Our proposal argues that adjudicating the responsibilities of platforms with respect to systemic challenges requires differentiating between what we call “acute” harms and “structural harms.” Acute harms are suitable for content moderation,…How to Assess Platform Impact on Mental Health and Civic Norms